Hasta La Gadget!

Newt Gingrich came on HuffPost Live to talk guns, FOX News and fiscal cliff business with HuffPost reporter Sam Stein and HuffPost Live Host Marc Lamont Hill, but something else came up: his ringtone.

In the midst of detailing his plan to begin a six-month study called, “Gingrich Productions” where Gingrich is setting out to find out exactly why he, Karl Rove, Dick Morris and several key members of the Romney campaign were so wrong with the numbers on election night, Gingrich’s phone began to ring.

As Newt gave the phone away to someone off camera, host Marc Lamont Hill zeroed in on the ringtone, forcing Gingrich to reveal a possibly embarrassing choice of his.

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Congress just passed a bill that lets you share your Michael Bay movie marathon with everyone on Facebook. What you still can’t do: send an email without worrying that Big Brother is watching.

The “Netflix amendment” to the Video Privacy Protection Act is headed to President Barack Obama’s desk for his signature after it was unanimously passed by the Senate on Dec. 20. The bill was crafted to let the movie rental giant allow users to share their online viewing habits on social networking sites like Facebook. Privacy protections imposed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had his video rental history exposed in 1987 had prohibited users from doing that.

But while the Netflix bill got swift action, ordinary Americans hoping for email privacy safeguards are still waiting. That’s because the Senate, behind closed doors, last week dropped an email privacy provision that would have forced domestic law enforcement agencies to get a warrant before reading your messages.

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According to Talking Points, Internet video streaming provider Netflix will be introducing “social features” to its service beginning next year. The report follows after the Senate’s decision last week to pass the so-called Netflix bill which aims to remove restrictions that prevented companies from sharing the rental history of their customers. This is also important for customers who want, say for example, to share on Facebook what TV shows they are watching. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Netflix Is Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated], NimbleTV Hopes To Deliver Cable TV Content Across All Devices,

Back in September, SpaceX posted a short video showing a glimpse of its reusable rocket, the Grasshopper. The company has released a new video of the rocket, this time sending it to its latest record of 131 feet. While not quite the two miles that was hinted, it was still an impressive distance. Check out the video of it after the jump.

For now, rockets make a crash landing into the ocean, never to be used again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX wants to shirk that reality, however, and utilize rockets that both take off and land vertically, allowing them to be reused. The Grasshopper has been shown off a total of three times now by SpaceX, the latest of which you can see in the video below.

While the rocket didn’t hit its target of at least a few hundred feet, it did improve over the last time we saw it. The rocket hovers in the air for a bit before gliding back down into place; the first time around, it did little more than bounce briefly into the air. The test was conducted in McGregor, Texas, on December 17, and was followed up by an announcement tweet by Elon Musk on Twitter.

This comes after SpaceX managed to score a contract with the United States Air Force on December 6. With the contract, SpaceX will get the chance to run two missions, during which it will get to demonstrate its space vehicles as part of the EELV program. The missions are slated to take place in 2014 and 2015.

[via TPM]

SpaceX’s latest reusable rocket test sends Grasshopper 131 feet is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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If today’s marijuana laws were a psychedelic musical, the citizens of Colorado and Washington State who voted for lawful recrational use would be singing “Legalize It,” with a sharp transition into the “No you can’t! Yes I can!” chorus from “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better).”
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